dave astels

Better late than never… Pics from thursday are here and pics from the banquet are here.

I didn’t find anything compelling at openspace, and so wandered about chatting with people: Scott Ambler, Gregori Melnik, and finally had the chance to meet Norm Kerth. I also finally met Luke Hohmann. The last part of the morning was spent in an openspace session ran by Dave West who is running the Institute for Advancement of Software Arts. Dave’s aggregating a lot of great ideas that have been bandied about for some time now by some very big names. It’s nice to see some real effort behind reinventing computer science education. It’s about time. I think it’s a natural step as the field matures.. the way we teach people has to change as our understanding of what CS is changes.

It was a good morning.

Lunch however, was a blast. I ended up sitting with Ward, comparing backgrounds, and discussing the joys of working close to the metal. Ward filled me in on his latest side projects working with very simple, very cheap micro-controllers arranged in networks and communicating very simply.

The afternoon was spent with more wandering around, chatting and networking. That, to me, is what a this conference is all about.. making new friends, catching up with old ones, finding out what everyone is up to.. what the latest buzz is. The Agile movement is truly a community. It’s nice to see that happening… and it’s nice to be part of it.

So now I’m back in the bar area, blogging and tweaking the pics, and chatting.

Kent Beck just said I was looking more & more like Hagrid… I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not. As Hagrid is my favourite character in the Harry Potter series, I’ll choose to take it as a compliment.

It’s going to be an early night tonight.. tomorrow will be busy… invited talks by Norm Kerth & Josh Kerievsky in the morning, and my workshop with Brian Marick in the afternoon.

Pics from today are here.

Another quiet morning so far. Breakfasted with Miro & J.B. Caught up on J.B.’s move to rural Manitoba. He’s in for some culture shock!

Then a chat with Scott Ambler and Norm Kerth. A bit of work while I sip my coffee then off to check out OpenSpace.

The remainder of today was spent hanging out and chatting with people: Mike Hill, Bob Payne, Josh Kerievsky, Ward Cunningham, Elizabeth Hendrickson, Scott Ambler, the guys from Sphere of Influence, and others.

One cool thing was that Bob Payne interviewed me for the series of Agile 2005 podcasts he’s putting together.

This evening I went to dinner with a group including Bill Wake and Rachael Davis.

Pics from today are here.

Rally and DigitalFocus threw a party Monday night. Not bad.. mexican food, drinks, and a decent but far too loud band. The quiet band at the ice breaker was far more appropriate IMHO. You could actually talk (or rather hear) comfortably there. With this band we actually had to leave the room and camp out in the exhibit area to have a discussion.

After having some food & drink.. that’s just what we did. Brian Marick, David Chelimsky, Andy Tinkham and I had a good discussion. We touched on various topics, including what I’m doing with Behaviour Driven Development & RSpec (more on that later). We were joined later by Bob Payne.

Bob & I wandered back into the party after a while, found more food and had the treat of watching (& listening to) Bob Martin joining the band on drums for a song. Pics are here, and a video clip of Bob on drums will be along soon.

I started off the day with a breakfast meeting with my editor at Prentice Hall. For those interested, I’ve finally gotten started on my Behaviour Driven Development book.

Registration opened promptly at 11:30.. with an anxious group waiting. The lines formed immediately but they moved quickly.

After registering I spent some time hanging out meeting people, and chatting. Then it was a quick lunch and off to the afternoon “Engineering Practices of Agile Teams” tag team talk. The talk started off with Gerard Meszaros started it off with a talk on user stories, followed by Mike Cohn on estimating and planning.

During the break I caught up with various people, as shown in the gallery.

After the break Jim Highsmith carried it on with a talk on agile project management. Ward Cunningham and Rick Mugridge finished the afternoon off in style with a talk on Fit and FitNesse. This talk was in a rather large room.. which was packed as can be seen in the pics.

Pics are here.

Well.. that was a decent time. I managed to catch up with several more folks.. and met plenty of new ones. A band, caricature artist, balloon animal “artist”, tarot reader, food, and drink. Not bad. And lots of people. It was fun.

Pics are here.

We visited out puppies for a while this afternoon to play and get to know them. And to take some pics/video. A selection of pics are at http://homepage.mac.com/dastels/PhotoAlbum3.html

Storm has abated, but has left tons of snow in it’s path… pretty much everything was closed or cancelled today.. and by late afternoon school tomorrow had already been cancelled. Check out some pics from around our house. And here’s some after the driveway was cleared.

It’s January in Nova Scotia.

This is the third blizzard in a week.. though I missed the one on Thursday while I was on-site in Detroit.

Sunday’s storm was especially impressive.. . we didn’t loose power, but there was some serious snow. Check out some pics.